firehose

You rarely hear about the losers.

Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Nerdist’s Chris Hardwick is set to host a currently untitled late night TV show on Comedy Central this fall. Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant will run the show which will be produced by Funny or Die.

The untitled show, which will launch in the fall, will air four nights a week at midnight, following The Colbert Report, giving the network a 11 PM-12:30 AM block anchored by The Daily Show. Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant will serve as executive producers/showrunners on the Chris Hardwick show, returning to Comedy Central, where they co-created and starred on the cult series Reno 911! The show, Comedy Central’s first midnight strip, will be formatted as a comedic panel show that will have a heavy social-media presence integrated throughout.

Welp, here’s a thing I guess I can talk about now! po.st/itxA8n/ @thomaslennon @funnyordie

— Chris Hardwick (@nerdist) April 30, 2013

image via Nerdist

via Deadline Hollywood, Chris Hardwick

NBCSports.com

DC Councilman wants team to change its name to Redtails NBCSports.com With increasing talk that “Redskins” is a racial slur not fit for a professional football team, one member of the City Council in Washington, D.C. has what he thinks is a better idea. Council member David Grosso told the Washington Post that he thinks the city's ... DC council member pushes name change for Washington RedskinsCNN (blog) Redskins Name Change: DC Councilmember David Grosso Offers The ...Huffington Post DC councilmember wants Redskins to change nameHouston Chronicle The Root -CBS sports.com (blog) all 10 news articles »

Okay, so I’m not sure why but for some reason there are a ton, a TON, of Princess Batman costumes, possibly more than the standard Batgirl costume. They come in 2 different flavors, bumblebee and hot pink. So, I’m just making one big Super Princess Batman compilation post (alternatively Ballerina Batman since those fluffy skirts can be ambiguous).

Don’t ask which Robin that is because I cannot keep track of all the dang Robins at this point… “Stephanie Carrie Graydrake-Waynetodd”

Source of all photos:
deantrippe, girlslovesuperheroes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), sparklysushi, donkeysalright, cosplayingwhileblack, crazycrafters.

The White House will soon name former telecommunications industry lobbyist and businessman Tom Wheeler as the head of the Federal Communications Commission, The Wall Street Journal reports. President Barack Obama could make the announcement as soon as this Wednesday, the Journal's sources say, setting the stage for Wheeler to replace the outgoing Julius Genachowski. Wheeler currently works with venture capital group Core Capital, but he spent over a decade as head of the CTIA wireless industry group, leaving in 2004. Before that, he served as president of the National Cable Television Association.

A 2002 Los Angeles Times profile describes Wheeler as "the rock star of telecom," crediting him with helping to fuel a major spectrum expansion for the mobile phone industry. He's also not a surprise pick for the FCC chairmanship, either. Similarly to Genachowski, who helped with Barack Obama's campaign, Wheeler was named as a member of Obama's Presidential transition effort following the 2008 election; his name was floated as a possible replacement not long after Genachowski stepped down in March.

So far, responses from public interest groups have been mixed. Free Press said that "on paper" Tom Wheeler did not look like someone who would "stand up to industry giants and protect the public interest," but Public Knowledge — which characterized Genachowski's tenure as "one of missed opportunities" — had more praise to offer. "Some have expressed concern about Tom's past history as the head of two industry trade associations," wrote Public Knowledge head Gigi Sohn. "But his past positions should be seen in light of the times and in the context of his other important experiences and engagement with policy."

• Source The Wall Street Journal
• Related Items tom wheeler ctia wireless association lobbying telecom telecommunications white house barack obama

The parents of Adam Holland recently filed suit on behalf of their son, alleging defamation of character after a 10-year-old photo of Holland was turned into an Internet meme mocking his Down syndrome.

jfruh writes "One of the hooks Microsoft has used to get developers to build apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 has been pubCenter, an ad network that's easy to add to apps and provides revenue back to publishers. But many developers found that on April 1 that revenue abruptly dropped by an order of magnitude, with most potential ad impressions going unsold; one developer reported only 160,000 ads served to 60 million requests, a fill rate of less than 0.3%. Since many of the ads before April 1 had been for Bing, this may be a sign that Microsoft is no longer willing to subsidize its developers — and that advertisers aren't that interested in buying ads in Windows 8 apps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Doctors announced today that two-and-a-half year old Hannah Warren just became the youngest person in history to receive a bioengineered organ transplant, a new windpipe made of a synthetic scaffold and her own stem cells. The nine-hour long procedure was performed April 9, at Children's Hospital of Illinois in Peoria, but the results were just made public now. Doctors now expect that Warren will be able to return home in a few months and breathe, eat, drink and swallow using the new windpipe, all of which she couldn't do without the aid of machines until now.

---

"The ultimate potential of stem-cell based therapy is to avoid human donation."

Furthermore, because the procedure was performed using her own cells and no donor organ, there is next to zero risk of rejection. Aside from saving Warren's life, the successful procedure is a huge boost to the hopes of the field of regenerative medicine, which spurs the body's own cells and natural processes to help heal wounds, even growing whole new organs. "The ultimate potential of this stem-cell based therapy is to avoid human donation," said the lead surgeon, Paolo Macchiarini, of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, who traveled to Peoria to perform the surgery.

Warren was born in Seoul, Korea, with tracheal agenesis, which means she did not develop a windpipe (trachea), preventing her from breathing. Hannah's parents researched the medical options to help their daughter, and after finding that existing therapies wouldn't provide a longterm solution, they turned to regenerative medicine specialists. Although they initially planned to do the procedure in either South Korea or Sweden, funding was an issue. Children's Hospital of Illinois, housed on the campus of the Catholic OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, eventually accepted the case, after the leadership prayed on the matter and determined it wasn't in violation of Catholic teachings.

Several other doctors and companies around the globe contributed to the effort, including Harvard Bioscience, which provided the artificial scaffold used to create the windpipe, as Children's Hospital outlined in a news release. As for Hannah, there have been some complications since the surgery, but she's said to be in good spirits and breathing on her own, without the aid of a tube, as The New York Times reports.

• Via io9
• Source Children's Hospital of IllinoisChildren's Hospital of Illinois
• Image Credit Harvard Apparatus Regenerative Technology
• Related Items medicine organ donation stem cells bioengineering regenerative medicine organ transplants windpipe trachea hannah warren children's hospital of illinois osf saint francis medical center paolo macchiarini harvard bioscience

You can have your TARDIS dresses — we want a TARDIS control panel dress!

Read more...

Google's Project Glass is still exotic, futuristic, and distant — it's available only for extremely early adopters, including "creative individuals" who were let in through a Twitter and Google+ contest. But a year or more ahead of its consumer launch, Google is already trying to get ordinary people used to the idea of wearing a heads-up display. "Glass How-To: Getting Started," the first video released through a new Project Glass YouTube account, goes through the basics of wearing Glass, and more videos seem likely to be on the way.

In this introduction, users are shown how to adjust the Glass lens, and how to use a touchpad on the side to scroll through messages or other information and share it with friends. It doesn't remotely cover everything we've seen about the Glass interface, but it makes it seem understandable and natural, going over extensions of standard touch gestures. It also avoids addressing the strange situations you'll likely get into once you start talking to your glasses in public — at least until, Google hopes, everyone else is wearing Glass too.

---

• Source Project Glass (YouTube)
• Related Items project glass google glass heads-up display glass how-to Google

The awesome producer Bryan Fuller wants to makes an awesome new Star Trek TV series. Paramount won't let him, because they're busy letting J.J. Abrams make his Trek movies. But that doesn't mean Fuller doesn't have a captain in mind should he ever get the green light: Angela Bassett.

Read more...

Daily Beast

Senator Ayotte Confronted on Gun Vote Daily Beast New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte was confronted at a town-hall meeting in her own state on Wednesday by Erica Lafferty, the daughter of the Sandy Hook Elementary School principal who was killed in the school shooting. Lafferty first met with ... At Tilton town hall, Kelly Ayotte finds support, protests of background-checks voteConcord Monitor Sandy Hook victims daughter questions Kelly Ayotte on gun votePolitico In New Hampshire, Senator Finds Her Vote on Gun Bill Is Hot TopicNew York Times Fox News -New York Daily News -Philly.com all 66 news articles »

“Extremely limited edition” in this case means “you can’t have one.”

Artist Paolo Rivera has more reason than most to take pride in the box office success of Iron Man 3: He has blogged before about how thrilled he was that an early poster for the movie was based on his cover for Iron Man #63, and now he’s written about his emotional investment in seeing the film for the first time.

This would be noteworthy enough in its own right, but the piece is accompanied by a spectacular print that he’s painted exclusively for the cast and crew of the production. Rivera had previously produced a suitably 1940s-looking poster for those working on Captain America: The First Avenger, and the Iron Man 3 print is designed to resemble a battered old pulp novel (suitably enough, given the styling of the end credits animation and the origins of Robert Downey Jr. and Shane Black’s previous collaboration). This is an extremely cool piece of art, and as exclusive as any limited edition poster you’re likely to see — do not expect to see copies of this one ever turning up on eBay (unlike, say, the gougers flogging his “Precious Cargo” at a helluva mark-up).

BBC News

Cern re-creating first web page to revere early ideals BBC News WWW GFX Lost to the world: The first website. At the time, few imagined how ubiquitous the technology would become. Continue reading the main story. Related Stories. Cern to re-create first web page · Tim Berners-Lee wins engineers prize · Berners-Lee ... CERN recreates world's first web pageTimes of India Team rebuilding world's first websiteCNN CERN reposts the world's first Web pageWashington Post IBNLive -Telegraph.co.uk -USA TODAY all 107 news articles »

supersonicelectronic:

Ken Kocses.

Super Mario World paintings by Ken Kocses:

Read More

Each photo comprises more than 20 raw images captured of NASA's one-ton roving robot and the surrounding landscape at different stages of its Martian mission. These massive panoramas, created by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo, give us some of the most realistic glimpses yet at Curiosity's life on Mars.

Read more...

Dancers illuminated with light painting techniques perform inside a 24 camera “bullet time” rig in the video “LightSpin” by Eric Paré and Timecode Lab. You can watch 360 degree footage of individual dancers from the video in this gallery. The project’s 360 degree camera rig was used in a video we covered previously, “24×360.”

via PetaPixel

The Pet Bow Tie from Firebox is a fun, yet elegant reversible necktie for your pets (cats, dogs and even Nigerian Dwarf goats) that is sure to raise their cuteness level by leaps and bounds. It is available to purchase online.

images via Firebox.com

Vigile writes "One of the drawbacks to high end graphics has been the lack of low cost and massively-available displays with a resolution higher than 1920x1080. Yes, 25x16/25x14 panels are coming down in price, but it might be the influx of 4K monitors that makes a splash. PC Perspective purchased a 4K TV for under $1500 recently and set to benchmarking high end graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA at 3840x2160. For under $500, the Radeon HD 7970 provided the best experience, though the GTX Titan was the most powerful single GPU option. At the $1000 price point the GeForce GTX 690 appears to be the card to beat with AMD's continuing problems on CrossFire scaling. PC Perspective has also included YouTube and downloadable 4K video files (~100 mbps) as well as screenshots, in addition to a full suite of benchmarks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Proposal would overturn Postal Service’s ban on delivering wine and beer.

LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ—After learning NBA center Jason Collins became the first active player from a major American team sport to come out as a homosexual, gay 15-year-old Kyle Morgan confirmed Monday that he still plans to buy a LeBron James Miami Heat ...

The ruse is common in spy movies---an attractive female saunters in at a critical moment and seduces the otherwise infallible protagonist, duping him into giving up the goods. It works in Hollywood and it works in real life, too. Men tend to say yes to attractive women without really scrutinizing whether or not they are trustworthy. But scientists have shown, for the first time, that a drug may be able to overcome this "honey trap," and help men make more rational decisions. Nearly 100

By Samit Sarkar on Apr 30, 2013 at 5:00p

We all love video games, but they can be better.

That was the sentiment driving Different Games, a conference held this past weekend at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn. Individuals involved in various aspects of the game industry — developers, critics, academics, journalists and more — gathered for a two-day summit from April 27-28 about diversity, difference and inclusivity in games and culture.

For a collection of discussions featuring such a diverse array of people, Different Games was remarkable in the level of agreement between them. Panelists often referenced previous presenters to build on their points, whether from a flashy slideshow presentation or a relatively dry research paper. A series of panels and workshops focused on what the organizers perceived to be rampant problems with the game industry, covering well-trod ground (harassment in online gaming) as well as topics with lower awareness (cultural assumptions in game design).

While most of the presenters brought up different issues, or at least, new angles on previously discussed problems, everyone was in agreement that they were indeed serious issues that the game industry is doing a poor job of addressing. A few themes and narratives emerged in hours' worth of panels, if not answers to the questions being raised or solutions to the problems.

A number of the presenters discussed the harassment that people, especially women and minorities, often encounter when playing games online. Gabriela T. Richard, a doctoral student at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, discussed a study she did in which she asked Latino gamers about their gaming habits and experiences. The female respondents were more sensitive to what they saw as a lack of variety in the choices of games available to them, let alone games tailored to female players. The survey's male participants noted a lack of ethnic representation in games — few non-white characters — though they were less sensitive to that issue than the women were to the lack of choice.

In Richard's study, the subjects noted that non-white male characters tended to be stereotypes, while female characters were hypersexualized. Female players had to deal with gendered insults online, while men often received ethnically charged harassment. The men either became accustomed to the abuse, or decided to preclude the harassment by playing with their microphones muted and forming supportive communities with other friends of color. Harassment, Richard pointed out, is an exclusionary practice — it seeks to keep gaming confined to a niche audience of self-styled hardcore gamers.

online games sit at the intersection of sports and tech, fields where "hegemonic masculinity" is enforced

Staci Tucker, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon, offered an explanation for the hate speech and harassment online. She posited that online games, as a competitive endeavor whose participants are often tech-savvy, sit at the intersection of sports and technology. They naturally are fields where "hegemonic masculinity" is enforced, said Tucker — male-dominated fields.

Designers often run into trouble when they try to rectify those deep-rooted inequities. When Richard tried to design games for girls — encouraging and including female desires, interests and preferences — she ended up unintentionally pandering to stereotypes, she explained. And developers bring their own biases to the table, whether they're conscious of them or not, argued Mohini Dutta, co-founder and director of narrative strategies at Antidote Games, and a designer of serious games about issues like climate change.

In a talk called "Games Colonialism: Cultural Assumptions in Game Design," Dutta recounted her time in Indonesia designing games for children. She began playing physical games with dice, and noticed the children shied away from those games, though she couldn't initially figure out why. Dutta eventually realized that Indonesia is a largely Muslim nation, and in Islam, gambling is a serious sin.

"Dice equals gambling; gambling equals damnation," said Dutta. "We completely forgot to account for this."

Dutta is originally from India, but she learned her approach to game design in the West. Much of popular game culture, she said, is Western- or Eurocentric; Western games often include elements of games of chance such as dice and playing cards. She put forth a concept she called "games colonialism," a version of colonialism she defined as "when one group uses its games to prioritize its tastes onto another people."

In attempting to play dice-based games with Muslim children, said Dutta, "I participated in this cycle of cultural oppression by failing to recognize the problem" because "my own game design practice is based in Western-style game culture."

This, Dutta argued, is one of a few major systemic issues in the design of serious games. Their designers work in cultural isolation from players, and build games based on assumptions about those cultures; content experts are academics who rarely have a better cultural perspective; and the effectiveness of the games is never tested. "The end user is the last priority," she added.

game developer Robert Yang

The best solution to pervasive problems with diversity and inclusivity in games, said many of the speakers and panelists, is to increase the diversity of the people making games — an argument others have espoused, including game developer and writer Kim Swift. The best way to do that, the Different Games presenters argued, is to democratize game development.

Alison Harvey, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Toronto, highlighted user-generated content as a way that some games are allowing players to become creators. Her lecture focused on an audience that few designers account for — children with physical disabilities. According to Harvey, user-generated content is vital because it provides "radical customization" that allows for innovative sensory inputs and other disability-oriented tweaks. It also challenges the typical relationship of adult production and childhood consumption.

Other speakers discussed modern tools like Twine, the free adventure game creation engine that requires no programming knowledge. Mattie Brice, a critic and game designer who happens to be a transgender individual of mixed race, pointed out that game development has high barriers to entry — it typically entails a set of specialized skills, equipment and education, and those requirements tend to limit the diversity of voices in development.

"I've never had access to an engineering education, to all the technical skills, to the tools that even these indie developers are using," said Anna Anthropy, a transgender game developer and critic and the author of Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. Anthropy is known for games such as Dys4ia, an autobiographical Flash game about her experience with hormone replacement therapy. She pointed out that developers like her aren't just making different games; they're forced to make games differently because they don't have the same resources as others.

Anthropy argued that it's vital for the wider audience, let alone marginalized individuals such as Brice and Anthropy, to be able to make games. As an interactive experience, a game can be a powerful empathy engine for creators to get a message across to players, which helps make games just as important a method of communication as other media. But according to Anthropy, most modern games aren't interested in empathy.

"The culture of video games is an empathy-challenged culture"

"The culture of video games is an empathy-challenged culture," said Anthropy. "As a trans woman, I exist in a society that is continuously trying to erase my existence." The final presenter, Temple University assistant professor Adrienne Shaw, also touched on this issue in explaining why diversity is so badly needed among games and their creators. "Many marginalized audiences have simply given up on the video game industry," she pointed out.

That seemed to be the overarching theme at Different Games: making everyone who creates and plays games feel welcome, and not giving up on the medium's potential for empathy and change. The conference demonstrated that it's premature to say we've reached a tipping point in terms of how inclusive and diverse the larger game industry is, but the existence of Different Games alone — the fact that people within the industry as well as outside observers are asking these questions of game makers and players — is an encouraging sign for the future.

timgspears:

Window Socket - Kyuho Song & Boa Oh

So this is an absolutley brilliant idea! Just attach the plug on to a window and it will harness solar energy. A small converter will convert it into electricity which can be freely used as a plug when you are in the car, on a plane or outside.

Love this design and I really think it has a great potential.

Pablo Picasso

Flavorwire has posted a photo gallery of famous artists posing with their feline friends. Among the top cat fiends in the art world: Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei owns 40 cats, and Andy Warhol once owned 25 cats all named Sam.

Ai Wei Wei

Henri Matisse

Frida Kahlo

Edward Gorey

Andy Warhol

Georgia O’Keeffe

Salvador Dali